MIT has created an interesting little tool known as Immersion that compiles your personal Gmail metadata into a map of the people you contact the most.

The project, which became available to the public on June 30th, can access users' From, To, CC, Timestamp, and similar Gmail fields to obtain information and create a meticulous account of who you email and who they're connected to.

Tabs work for browsing, can they for email as well?

Can you remember surfing the web before tabs? Power surfing has never been the same, and even casual web users can benefit from tabbed browsing. Google didn't invent the concept, nor did the company even popularize tabbed browsing, but it is incorporating tabs of a slightly different kind into its Gmail service on the desktop and mobile. It's almost like a pre-sorting system.

One storage container to rule them all.

A cloud of common sense just landed on Google, and instead of offering users separate storage caps for Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+ photos, the sultan of search has decided to offer up 15GB of unified storage for free. In doing so, users are in complete control of how much each of Google's cloud services can hold, which is particularly great if you're deeply invested in Drive and/or Google+ Photos, two services that were previously limited to 5GB combined.

Make free calls in the U.S. and Canada from your Gmail account.

Do you use Gmail to make phone calls? Did you even know that feature existed? Either way, Google is extending the free calling feature for Gmail users in the U.S. and Canada for at least another year. The "Call phones from Gmail" service launched in 2010, allowing users to make and receive free domestic calls (and low rates for other countries) right from within Gmail.

Lack of consumer interest is keeping Google from building Windows 8 and WP8 apps.

It probably does not matter a great deal to those hell bent on avoiding Windows 8 like the plague, but for those who have jumped on the Windows 8 bandwagon with alacrity, the lack of triple-A apps on the platform must be worrying. If you happen to be a Windows 8 early adopter waiting for things to improve, you are unlikely to find recent comments by Google’s Clay Bavor very comforting.

Google is inviting Gmail users to try out a new way to compose and reply to messages in Gmail. The redesigned compose window appears as a pop-up window inside the inbox rather than a dedicated, full-size window. It's a subtle change, but is big on convenience in that you can compose new messages while still surfing your inbox folders. It's essentially a larger size chat window.

Having already conquered search, Google seems to have set its sights on doing everything in its power to promote its Google+ network. There's no need to feign surprise, then, that Google its giving is Gmail video chat service a makeover with Google+ Hangouts. The alteration upgrades Gmail's peer-to-peer based video chat feature with "more modern video calling technology" that promises to improve reliability and enhance video quality, as well as allow Gmail users to connect with people using Google+.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, may we have your attention. All is right in the world this morning, and you may all commence firing off breakup emails, work communication, chain letters, and whatever else you might use your Gmail account(s) for. Google's popular email service is back up and running after suffering a severe outage that potentially affected up to 35 million Gmail users yesterday.

Last August, offline Gmail returned to Google Chrome after a brief absence, during which it went from being a Gears-based feature to an HTML5-powered Chrome Web Store app. Now Google has updated that app. Hit the jump for more.

It’s easy to forget sometimes that Google is not a giant monolithic entity that eats your search data, but is in fact, run by people. And people can make mistakes; like for instance releasing a much anticipated app with a crippling bug. That’s what’s going down today as Google has had to pull the just released Gmail iOS app after a bug was found that rendered notifications non-functional.